The likes of Webvan pioneered grocery delivery back in the dot com days, and fun fact, Amazon owns and continues to operate what is left of Webvan. In those halcyon days, I used Webvan quite a bit. Sounds a bit silly, but being able to order groceries online and have them delivered within the hour felt like living in the future.

Prime Now offers Amazon Prime members in participating cities free two-hour delivery of various items, not just groceries, from Amazon and several other local stores. You can pay $7.99 for one-hour delivery.

Prime Now only has a mobile app for now, which makes browsing a bit cumbersome, and item availability for delivery depends on the stores. Eventually, we found all the stuff we needed and upon checking out were presented with several delivery times, most of which were taken. Makes sense, it’s a very new service, so I’m sure the stores are measuring demand before committing too many resources.

We chose the 6-8 PM delivery window, and around 6, the person collecting the order texted us to say two items we’d chosen were out of stock. He recommended substitutions, and the order was on its way.

Similar to Uber and Lyft, Prime Now has a map showing the store and your location as a means for status updates on the order, although it doesn’t have a moving icon to show the driver’s progress.

The order arrived easily within the 6-8 PM window, and everything was as expected. One nice feature, the Prime Now app allows for a tip on checkout, so no awkwardness at the door.

There were some unexpected hiccups, but we agreed that Prime Now was worth future tries. I expect as the service is used, the demand should prompt ironing out of the hiccups we encountered.